United States or Gabon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They trotted the little detour in silence, the corners of her mouth wilting, he would have declared, had he the words, like a field flower in the hands of a picnicker. Marylin could droop that way, so suddenly and so whitely that almost a second could blight her. "Now you're mad, ain't you?" he said, ashamed to be so quickly conciliatory and trying to make his voice grate.
But lak I tol' you, he didn' have 'nough money to buy 'em both, so his Uncle John say he'd buy mammy an' den he would loan her over to Marse George fer pappy. An' de fust chile would be Mr. John's, an' de secon' Marse George's, an' likewise. Mammy was a Missourian name Marylin Napier Davenpo't. An' pappy was name Martin Newsome. "Darkies libed in li'l old log houses wid dirt chimbleys.
A little sigh for the death of a day, a sob for the beauty of that death, and a hope and ecstasy for the new day yet unborn all of that on a little throbbing mouth organ. "Getaway," cried Marylin, and sat up, spilling sand, "that's it! That's what I meant a while ago. Hear? It can't be talked. That's it on the mouth organ!" "It?" "It! Yes, like I said.
I smell the blood of an ice-cream sundae!" The cop has his eye on you!" Therein lay some of the wonder of her freshet laughter. Because to Marylin a police officer was not merely a uniformed mentor of the law, designed chiefly to hold up traffic for her passing, and with his night stick strike security into her heart as she hurried home of short, wintry evenings.
"Thank you," said Marylin, the infinitesimal second while his hat and cowlick lifted, her own gaze seeming to run down those avenues of his eyes for a look into the pools at the back. "That was it, too, Getaway! The thing that fellow looked that I couldn't say. He said it with his eyes." "Who?" "That fellow who gave me this seat."
Facing her there on these sidewalks of slops, and the unprivacy of stoops swarming with enormous young mothers and puny old children, Getaway, with a certain fox pointiness out in his face, squeezed her arm until she could feel the bite of his elaborately manicured finger nails. "Marry me, Marylin," he said, "and you'll wear diamonds."
Then from the zig of the fire escape above, before it twisted down into the zag of hers, there came to Marylin, through the medley of city silences and the tears in her heart, this melody, on a jew's-harp: If it had any key at all, it was in the mood of Chopin's Nocturne in D flat major.
"Mustn't get fussy that way with me, Marylin. It scares me off. I've had something to show you all day, but you keep scaring me off." "What is it?" she said, tiptoe. His mouth drew up to an oblique. "You know." "No, I don't." "Maybe I'll tell you and maybe I won't," he cried, scooping up a handful of sand and spraying her. "What'll you give me if I tell?" "Why nothing." "Want to know?"
On her very own ceiling the whisper of footsteps of restless comings and goings stealthy comings and goings and then after an hour, suddenly and ever so softly, the ball-of-a-foot squeak! The-ball-of-a-foot squeak! Marylin knew that step. And yet she sat, quiet. A star had come out.
And little Marylin, who didn't want to want it, actually kissed the bare dot on her left ring finger where she could feel the burn of it, and there in the crowded street, where he knew he was surest of his privacy with her, he stole a kiss off that selfsame finger, too. "I'll make their eyes hang out on their cheeks like grapes when they see you coming along, Marylin."
Word Of The Day